While together with Serzh Sargsyan and Vladimir Putin in memorial complex On April 24, the leaders of the states that recognized this crime against humanity gathered on the Tsitsernakaberd (Swallow's Fortress) Mountain in Yerevan on April 24 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The so-called “Peace Summit” is being held in Turkey.
TURKISH SUMMIT
“Unfortunately, Turkey continues its traditional policy of denial, from year to year“ improving ”its toolkit for distorting history: the centenary of the Gallipoli battles this year marks the first time on April 24, while they began on March 18, 1915 and continued until the end of January 1916. of the year, ”Armenian leader Serzh Sargsyan noted back in January in his letter to Prime Minister Erdogan about the invitation to the summit, pointing out the real goal of Turkey - to divert the attention of the world community from the events of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
And in a recent interview with the Turkish newspaper Hurriet Armenian President continued the theme of the "peace summit":
“For us, the 100th anniversary of the Genocide is not a matter of competition. If Ankara's goal is to ensure participation in its events as much as possible more Heads of State in order to divert attention from the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, we are pursuing much more far-reaching and serious goals - to create a platform for preventing similar crimes against humanity in the future. Unlike Turkey, we do not blackmail, do not threaten, do not force the international community to take part in our events. All those who take part in our events are guided not by political or economic interests, but by the principles of morality and universal human values, ”Sargsyan was quoted as saying by arminfo.
PROPHECY OF THEODOR ROOSEVELT
In a letter to Cleveland Goodley Dodge dated May 11, 1918, the 26th US President Theodore Roosevelt made a prophetic prediction less than a year before his death: “... the massacre of Armenians is the greatest crime of this war (the First World War - ed.), and if we do not succeed in opposing Turkey, then we are conniving at her ... The failure of a radical fight against Turkish terror means that all the talk about the future world around the world is nonsense. "
And so it turned out ...
6 million lives were claimed by the Holocaust, organized by Hitler, who is credited with the following phrase regarding the possible condemnation of mass killings: "After all, who is talking about the annihilation of Armenians today?"
Then there was the US war in Vietnam, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge Pol Pot in Cambodia, the massacre of the Tutsi people in Rwanda, the current extermination of Russian-speaking people in southeastern Ukraine, the massacre of the civilian population of Syria - including Armenians, Copts and Kurds ...
ORIGINS OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN TURKEY
April 24 is a mourning date in history, which speaks of the first purposeful large-scale extermination of people on a national and religious principle, which began a century ago. Pope Francis on April 12, in his sermon, called the Armenian genocide one of the three most terrible calamities and crimes of the 20th century.
However, the genocide of 1915-1923 was preceded by two "preparatory" solutions to the "Armenian question" in Ottoman Turkey... How and why did this become possible? Who planned and carried out the massacre?
Armenia, which adopted Christianity as a state religion in 301, suffered for its choice and does not cease to suffer to this day. Christianity for Armenian people has become more than a religion. It became his soul, mentality. Most of the books were published in grabar - church Armenian - until the end of the 19th century. Schools and universities have operated in monasteries and temples from time immemorial. Poets and philosophers, astronomers and mathematicians worked here.
And the khachkars - cross-stones with a unique stone ligature around the flowering cross - evoked optimism and faith. The faith that the conquerors could not destroy - neither the Persians, nor the hordes of Tamerlane, nor the Arabs, nor the Seljuk Turks. It was not possible to make the Armenians either apostates or assimilate.
Khachkars near the cell of Gregory the Illuminator in the rocky monastery of Geghard in Armenia, founded by this saint in the 4th century. Photo: K. Markaryan
However, it was especially hard for the Armenians when the Turkic tribes invaded their ancestral lands from the Far East and Central Asia. With the fall of Constantinople (Constantinople), the capital of Byzantium, the ally of Great Armenia, difficult times began. Christian churches turned into mosques: minarets were erected around, and the faces of saints in churches were painted over. The Ottomans treated the giaours (infidels): Armenians, Greeks, Slavs and other peoples as second-class people.
Islamic fundamentalism matured and took shape by the second half of the 19th century, and flourished during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid. The Armenians became especially hated by the Turks, who hoped for help from Christian Russia.
After the next Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78. the Balkan peoples were freed from the Turkish yoke. But the position of the Armenians has not changed. The Berlin Congress, designed to revise the terms of the San Stefano Peace Treaty, which ended the Russo-Turkish War, was held under strong pressure from Germany, Britain and Austria-Hungary. Russia a new war would not pull against the coalition. Therefore, they had to forget about the improvement of the position of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.
But not to the Turks. Over the 18 years after the Berlin Congress, the population of Western Armenia, which was under Turkish occupation, decreased by about 500-600 thousand as a result of systematic pogroms.
British Prime Minister (1916-1922) Lloyd George wrote the following in The Truth About the Peace Talks:
“According to the Peace of San Stefano (1878), Russian troops were supposed to occupy Armenia until the necessary reforms were carried out [by the Turks]. This decree was canceled by the Berlin Treatise of 1878, which was entirely the result of our threatening pressure and was glorified by us as the greatest triumph of England, which brought "honorable peace." Armenia was sacrificed on the triumphal altar erected by us. The Russians were forced to leave; the unfortunate Armenians were again crushed by the fifth of their old oppressors, who pledged to "carry out improvements and reforms in the provinces inhabited by Armenians."
We all know how these obligations have been violated for forty years, despite repeated protests from the country, which was the main culprit in the return of Armenia to the rule of the Turks. The policy of the British government led, with fatal inevitability, to the horrific massacres of 1895-1897 and 1909, and to the horrific massacre of 1915. As a result of these atrocities, unparalleled even in the history of Turkish despotism, the number of the Armenian population in Turkey has decreased by more than a million. ”
Lloyd George did not take into account that the genocide continued in the early 1920s, taking at least half a million more civilian lives, which were dealt with by the regular army of the Ottoman Empire.
ARMENIANS - INTERFERENCE ON THE WAY TO GREAT TURAN
Both in the Ottoman Empire and in today's Turkey, they never abandoned the creation of the so-called Great Turan - a pan-Turkist state, into which Transcaucasia was supposed to enter, North Caucasus, Crimea, Volga region, middle Asia up to Altai with part of Mongolia ...
The implementation of these plans was always hindered by the Armenians, who, in addition, also sympathized with the Russians. Therefore, the Armenians, who, unlike the same Georgians, practically did not succumb to Turkishization, it was decided to destroy.
This was done in the most Jesuitical way and with a material background. Turkish officials who left the Balkan countries after their liberation from the Ottoman yoke were offered to settle ... in places of compact residence of national minorities, primarily in the Armenian quarters of cities and villages. The conflicts that began, which the troops were in a hurry to suppress, ended with the physical destruction of those who disagreed ... and the seizure of their property.
Invented in this way under Sultan Abdul-Hamid at the end of the 19th century, the solution to the "Armenian question" was made their banner by the Young Turks who came to power in 1908, led by Kemal Pasha, who later received the name of Ataturk (the father of all Turks).
The plans for the extermination of the Armenian population were developed in October 1911 at the congress of the "Unity and Progress" party ("Ittihad ve Terakki") and finally took shape under the veil of the First World War.
In September 1914, at a secret meeting chaired by the Minister of Internal Affairs Talaat Pasha, a special body was formed - the Executive Committee of the Three, which included the leaders of the Young Turks Nazim, Behaetdin Shakir and Shukri.
Nazym, realizing the benefit of the clash of world powers among themselves, said at that meeting: “If we are content with a partial massacre, as was the case in 1909 in Adana and other regions, then instead of benefit it will bring harm, since we risk awakening elements that are also going to be swept away from the road-Arabs and Kurds; the danger will triple and the implementation of our intention will be difficult. I told you several times at this meeting and now I repeat: if the cleaning is not general and final, then harm instead of benefit is inevitable. The Armenian people must be completely destroyed so that not a single Armenian remains on our land and this name itself is forgotten. Now there is a war, such an opportunity will no longer be. The intervention of the great powers and the noisy protests of the world press will remain unnoticed, and if they find out, they will be presented with a fait accompli, and thus the issue will be settled. This time our actions should take on the character of total extermination of Armenians; it is necessary to destroy every single one ... Our country must be cleansed of non-Turkish elements. Religion has no meaning or meaning to me. My religion is Turan. ”
In February 1915, Minister of War Enver Pasha ordered the extermination of the Armenians who served in the Turkish army. At the beginning of the war, about 60 thousand Armenians aged 18 to 45 were drafted into the army - the most combat-ready part of the male population ...
For the extermination of Armenians, a 10,000-strong special punitive organization "Teshkilat-i Makhsus" was created.
Having destroyed the male conscripts, the Turks then began to crack down on the remaining old people, women and children.
In 1915, on April 24, in Constantinople, more than 600 representatives of the Armenian intelligentsia were arrested and later killed. From this, the countdown of the final solution of the "Armenian question" by the Turks began ...
The lists of people to be destroyed include people of different political views and professions: writers, artists, musicians, teachers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, businessmen, political and religious leaders. The only thing that united them was their nationality and position in society.
And the civilian population, without allowing people to take either food or belongings, was allegedly deported to new places of residence - in the Mesopotamian desert. On the roads they robbed, raped, killed, burned alive, ripped open the stomachs of pregnant women ...
The name of the Der-Zor desert has become a household name - only here 200 thousand Armenians were killed. Concentration camps were created, where people were systematically cut out. The Germans will then put it on stream by applying gas chambers and crematoria ...
Germany - Turkey's main ally - largely condoned and supported the extermination of the Armenians. The real goals of Germany's deportation were known. For example, the German consul in Trebizond in July 1915 reported on the deportation of Armenians in this vilayet and noted that the Young Turks intended to put an end to the “Armenian question” in this way.
German Protestant Pastor Fischer casually narrated: “A group of Armenian women from the Van Orphanage was hung in the trees and then scalped ... The newborn child was chopped into pieces with an ax, with which the mother of the child was strangled by pushing these pieces into her mouth. The rest of the girls of the orphanage were dishonored and killed. "
And the famous Armenian writer Hovhannes Tumanyan wrote about what he saw in the Van vilayet: “Nails were stuck in the foreheads of the children; , they cut the body into pieces with red-hot metal and roasted over the fire, roasted alive. Children were killed before the eyes of the parents, before the eyes of the children - the parents. "
RUSSIA, GENERAL ANDRANIK AND THE PEOPLE'S AVENGERS
At the same time, Nicholas II opened the borders of the empire for Armenian refugees. They tried to find housing and work for people. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were saved in this way.
Detachments of Armenian volunteers who did not have Russian citizenship fought in the tsarist army on the Transcaucasian front. Under the leadership of a native of the Ottoman Empire, commander Andranik Ozanyan (later - Major General of the Russian Army), the Armenian squad heroically fought. Then the Armenian volunteer corps was formed.
Andranik himself for personal courage in battles in 1915-1916. was awarded the St. George Medal, IV degree, George crosses IV and III degree, Orders of St. Stanislav II degree with swords and St. Vladimir IV degree.
General Andranik
I will note that monuments to the general have been erected in many countries that fought the Turkish yoke. Streets and squares of cities were named after him, films about the hero were shot and books were written.
But it all ended with the coming to power of the Bolsheviks and the conclusion of peace with Turkey. General Andranik did not accept this, leaving for emigration ...
In August 1915, Talaat Pasha cynically stated that "the actions against the Armenians have basically been carried out and the" Armenian question "no longer exists."
But it was not there. In some areas of Western Armenia, the Armenian rebels bought rifles from the Kurdish tribes, if possible, and began to put up stubborn resistance. (In Ottoman Turkey, only Muslims were allowed to have weapons.)
Armenian fedayeen defended Sasun, Mush, Van, Shatakh, Musa-Dag, Shapin, Ajn, Ayntap ... As long as they could hold out against regular army equipped with artillery. Foreign authors have written books and films about the heroic pages of the Armenian resistance ...
But the condemnation of Turkey, punishment of those guilty of crimes by the world community did not follow. All states were looking for their preferences in the First World War and in alliance with Turkey. There was no time for the Armenians ...
Bolshevik Russia also helped the Turkish "Red Army comrades" with huge sums of money, food consignments (even during the famine in the Volga region), and all kinds of weapons. For the time being, Ataturk willingly played up to Lenin in this, who was trying to stay in power at any cost. Turkish troops even dressed up in budenovka, posing as ardent supporters of communism (at the same time cutting out the "reds" on the sly in Turkey itself), allegedly ready to "fan the world fire of the revolution."
Genocide spawned a wave of refugees in different countries Europe and America. Leaving their homes, people deeply in their hearts hid the bitterness of parting with their homeland and the thirst for revenge on the murderers.
Having failed to obtain support from the "civilized world", the Armenians opened their accounts to the Ottoman barbarians. Retribution overtook them until the 1970s.
Genocide ideologue Talaat Pasha was shot by student Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin on March 16, 1921 (the Berlin court acquitted him).
Enver Pasha was killed in 1922 in Turkestan by the red commanders Akop (Yakov) Melkumov and Georgy Agabekov.
Jemal Pasha was killed on June 25, 1922 in Tiflis: Stepan Tsakhikyan and Petros Ter-Poghosyan carried out an act of retaliation.
Said Halim Pasha(ex-Prime Minister of Turkey) was killed on December 6, 1921 in Rome by Arshavir Shirakyan.
Shakir Bey, chief ideologist Ittihada, was killed on April 17, 1922 in Rome. He was punished by Aramon Yerkanyan and Arshavir Shirakyan.
TURKEY STRONGLY DOES NOT RECOGNIZE GENOCIDE
However, neither the acts of retaliation, nor the calls of the world powers to Turkey and the recent appeal from the MEPs to recognize the Armenian genocide have so far yielded any result.
Prime Minister Erdogan only a couple of times expressed his sympathy for the pain of the Armenian people, but at the same time noted that, they say, the First World War is to blame (remember the words of the ideologist of the Young Turks Nazim that the war will write off everything?) That many Turks also died.
It is as if German Chancellor Merkel did not recognize the Holocaust now and expressed her sympathy for the death of Jews, saying that the Second World War is to blame for everything, that many Germans also died ...
Ankara is infuriated by the mere wording of "Armenian genocide" and recalls its ambassadors from countries that recognize this crime against humanity at the state level.
This happened after the recent mass of Pope Francis in Rome for the killed Armenians, when the Turkish ambassador was recalled from the Vatican.
And after the adoption on April 23 by the Austrian parliament of a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey also recalled its ambassador. Will this be done with regard to Germany as well? Indeed, in Berlin on April 24, the day of the 100th anniversary of the genocide, the Bundestag overwhelmingly approved a resolution in which the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians a hundred years ago in the Ottoman Empire was characterized as genocide, Reuters reports.
I will note that Chancellor Angela Merkel also took part in the meeting of the German parliament.
“Germany has its share of the fault in the events of those years,” said Bundestag Speaker Norbert Lamert, adding that real peace cannot be established without restoring justice to the victims of the Genocide, Tert.am reports.
I wonder if Ankara will dare to recall its ambassador from Moscow as well? By at least even the Turkish newspaper Hurriet asks such a question, recalling the greeting of Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 22 to the participants of the memorial evening "World without Genocide", in which he clearly calls genocide genocide.
On April 24, at the Tsitsernakaberd memorial complex in Yerevan, Vladimir Putin said the following:
“Today we mourn together with the Armenian people. In the hundreds Russian cities I want to emphasize this, Dear friends, hundreds of Russian cities will host more than 2,000 memorial events. They will be attended not only by representatives of the large Armenian community of Russia, numbering about 3 million people, but also tens of thousands of people of other nationalities. The position of Russia has been and remains consistent: we have always believed that there is no mass murder of people, and there can be no excuses, ”he is quoted as saying the Russian president NTV.
Vladimir Putin speaks at the Tsitsernakaberd memorial complex. Yerevan, April 24, 2015. Photo by the Presidential Press and Information Office.
Ankara's reaction was expected.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite all our warnings and appeals, regarded the events of 1915 as genocide. Such statements are unacceptable from Turkey's point of view, ”the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
We are waiting for further steps. You have to be consistent then ...
Catholicos of All Armenians Garegin II, First Lady of Armenia Rita Sargsyan and the presidents of Armenia - Serzh Sargsyan, Russia - Vladimir Putin, Cyprus - Nikos Anastasiades, France - Francois Hollande laying flowers at Tsitsernakaberd. Photo by the Presidential Press Service.
Meanwhile, French President Francois Hollande, who also arrived in Yerevan, stressed: “On this day, April 24, paying tribute to the memory of the victims of the genocide, I want to say to our Armenian friends: we will never forget this tragedy. I call for resistance like evil and universal recognition of genocide. "
However, some experts point out that Turkey refuses to acknowledge its 100-year-old fanaticism due to economic motives: it does not want, they say, to return the lands taken from the Armenians. And this is the fertile Ararat valley with the biblical Mount Ararat, where the Armenian people have lived for more than one millennium.
However, Armenia has never put forward territorial claims against Turkey or any other country. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan stated this in his interview to the Turkish newspaper Hurriet.
“There is no such task in the foreign policy agenda of our country, and there has never been, we are a full member of the international community and follow all world legal norms, but our Eastern neighbor, ignoring all these norms, keeps our border in blockade, which is the last closed border of Europe”, - arminfo quotes the words of the Armenian president.
The eternal flame of Tsitsernakaberd ... Photo by the Presidential Press and Information Office.
Serzh Sargsyan pointed out that Yerevan’s territorial claims against Ankara are spoken not in Armenia, but in Turkey: “Why do they do it, you have to draw conclusions” ...
Prospects for the resolution of the conflict in, aggravation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, the history of Armenia and the Armenian-Turkish relations political observer siteSaid Gafurov talks with political scientist Andrei Epifantsev.
Genocide problem: "Armenians and Turks behaved the same"
Armenian genocide
— Let's start right away with a controversial topic ... T Tell me right away, was there any genocide against Armenians by the Turks or not? I know that you have written a lot on this topic and understood this topic.
- There is no doubt that there was a massacre in Turkey in 1915 and that such things should never be repeated. My personal approach is that the official Armenian position, according to which it was genocide caused by the terrible hatred of the Turks towards the Armenians, is not correct in a number of positions.
Firstly, it is quite obvious that the reason for what happened was largely the Armenians themselves, who had staged an uprising before this. Which began long before 1915.
It all dragged on with late XIX century and covered, including Russia. The Dashnaks did not care who to blow up, Turkish officials or Prince Golitsyn.
Secondly, it is important to know what is usually not shown here: the Armenians, in fact, behaved like the same Turks - they staged ethnic cleansing, massacres, and so on. And if you put all the available information together, you get a complex picture of what happened.
— The Turks have their own genocide museum dedicated to the territory, which was "liberated" by the Armenian Doshnak units with the help of British gold and Russian weapons. Their commanders did report that not a single Turk remained there. Another thing is that the Dashnaks were then provoked by the British. And, by the way, the Turkish court in Istanbul under the Sultan condemned the organizers of the mass crimes against the Armenians. True, in absentia. That is, the fact of mass crime took place.
- Of course. And the Turks themselves do not deny this, they offer condolences. But they do not call the incident genocide. From the point of view of international law, there is a Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, signed, inter alia, by Armenia and Russia. It indicates who has the right to recognize the crime as genocide - this is the court in The Hague, and only he.
Neither Armenia nor the Armenian diaspora abroad has ever applied to this court. Why? Because they understand that they will not be able to prove this genocide in legal, historical terms. Moreover, all international courts - the European Court of Human Rights, the French Justice Court, and so on, when the Armenian diaspora tried to raise this issue in them, they were refused. Only since last October there have been three such courts - and the entire Armenian side has lost.
Let's go back to the first half of the twentieth century: even then it was obvious that both the Turkish and Armenian sides resorted to ethnic cleansing. Two American missionaries sent by Congress after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire saw a picture of ethnic cleansing by the Armenians.
We ourselves saw it in 1918, and in 1920, while the Soviet power has not yet been firmly established, either Armenian or Azeri purges. Therefore, as soon as the "factor of the USSR" disappeared, Nagorno-Karabakh immediately received the same purges. Today this territory has been cleared to the maximum. There are practically no Armenians left in Azerbaijan, and there are no Azerbaijanis in Karabakh and Armenia.
The positions of Turks and Azerbaijanis are fundamentally different
— And in Istanbul, meanwhile, there is a large Armenian colony, there are churches. This, by the way, is an argument against genocide.
- The positions of Turks and Azerbaijanis are fundamentally different. At the ethnic level, at the household level. There is no real territorial conflict between Armenia and Turkey now, but there is one with Azerbaijanis. Secondly, some events took place 100 years ago, while others are today. Thirdly, the Turks set themselves the goal not to destroy the Armenians physically, but to call them to loyalty, albeit by wild means.
Therefore, many Armenians survived in the country, whom they tried to convert, so to speak, to Islamize, but they remained Armenians inside themselves. Part of the Armenians survived, who were resettled further from the battle zone. After World War II, Turkey began to restore Armenian churches.
Now Armenians are actively going to Turkey to work. The Turkish government had ministers - Armenians, which is impossible in Azerbaijan. The conflict is now going on for very specific reasons - and the main thing is the land. A compromise option offered by Azerbaijan: autonomy high degree, but as part of Azerbaijan. So to say, the Armenians must become Azerbaijan. The Armenians categorically disagree with this - it will again be a massacre, deprivation of rights, and so on.
There are, of course, other options for settlement, for example, as was done in Bosnia. The parties have created a very complex state, consisting of two autonomous entities with their own rights, an army, and so on. But this option is not even considered by the parties.
Mono-states, states created on the basis of an ethnic project, are a dead end. The question is this: history is not finite, it continues. For some states, it is very important to get the dominance of their people on this land. And after it is provided, it is already possible to develop the project further, attracting other peoples, but on the basis of some kind of subordination. In fact, the Armenians now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Azerbaijanis, in fact, are at this stage.
Does the Nagorno-Karabakh problem have a solution?
— The Azerbaijani official line: the Armenians are our brothers, they must return, for that there are all the necessary guarantees, let them leave us only external defense and international affairs. Everything else will remain with them, including security issues. What is the position of Armenia?
Here everything comes across the fact that Armenia and the Armenian society have this position of the historical land - "this is our historical land, and that's it." There will be two states, one will be a state, it doesn't matter. We will not give up our historical land. We will rather die or leave there, but we will not live in Azerbaijan. Nobody says that nations cannot be wrong. Including the Armenians. And in the future, when they are convinced of their mistake, they will probably come to a different opinion.
The Armenian society today, in fact, is very divided. There are diasporas, there are Armenians of Armenia. A very strong polarization, more oligarchy than in our society, a very wide spread between Westerners and Russophiles. But with regard to Karabakh, there is a complete consensus in it. The Diaspora spends money on Karabakh, there is a powerful lobbying of the interests of the Karabakh Armenians in the West. The national-patriotic upsurge remains, it is warmed up and will long time persist.
But all national projects have their own moment of truth. In the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, this moment of truth has not yet arrived for either side. The Armenian and Azerbaijani sides still take maximalist positions, each of the elites has convinced its people that victory is possible only on maximalist positions, only by fulfilling all our requirements. "We are everything, our enemy is nothing."
People, in fact, have become hostages of this situation, it is already difficult to play back. And the same mediators who work in the Minsk Group face a difficult task: to persuade the elite to turn to the people and say - no, guys, we must lower the bar. Therefore, there is no progress.
- Berthold Brecht wrote: "You cannot feed hungry stomachs with nationalism." Azerbaijanis correctly say that the common Armenian people are the most affected by the conflict. The elite profit from military supplies, and life ordinary people meanwhile it is getting worse: Karabakh is a poor land.
- And Armenia is not a rich land. But for now, people are choosing guns from the "cannon or oil" option. In my opinion, a solution to the Karabakh crisis is possible. And this decision lies in the division of Karabakh. If it is simple to divide Karabakh, although I understand that it is difficult, but nevertheless: one part with one, another part with another.
To legitimize, to say: "The international community accepts this very option." Perhaps calculate the percentage of the population at the time of 1988 or 1994. Divide, solidify boundaries and say that anyone who unleashes a conflict that violates the status quo will be punished. The question will be resolved by itself.
Prepared for publication by Sergey Valentinov
Nikolai Troitsky, political commentator for RIA Novosti.
Saturday, April 24 is the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. This year marks 95 years since this bloody massacre began and terrible crime- mass extermination of people based on ethnicity. As a result, from one to one and a half million people were killed.
Unfortunately, this was not the first and far from the last case of genocide in recent history... In the twentieth century, humanity seems to have decided to return to the darkest times. In enlightened, civilized countries, medieval savagery and savagery suddenly revived - torture, reprisals against the relatives of convicts, forced deportation and total murder of entire peoples or social groups.
But even against this gloomy background, two of the most monstrous atrocities stand out - the methodical extermination of Jews by the Nazis, called the Holocaust, in 1943-45, and the Armenian genocide, perpetrated in 1915.
In that year, the Ottoman Empire was effectively ruled by the Young Turks, a group of officers who overthrew the Sultan and carried out liberal reforms in the country. With the outbreak of the First World War, all power in their hands was concentrated by the triumvirate - Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha and Dzhemal Pasha. It was they who organized the act of genocide. But they did not go for it because of sadism or innate ferocity. There were reasons and prerequisites for the crime.
Armenians have lived in Ottoman territory for centuries. On the one hand, they were subjected to a certain degree of discrimination on the basis of religion, like Christians. On the other hand, most of them stood out for wealth or at least prosperity, because they were engaged in trade and finance. That is, they played about the same role as the Jews in Western Europe, without which the economy could not function, but which at the same time regularly fell under pogroms and deportations.
The delicate balance was upset in the 80s - 90s of the XIX century, when underground political organizations of a nationalist and revolutionary persuasion were formed in the Armenian environment. The most radical was the Dashnaktsutyun party - the local analogue of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the Socialist-Revolutionaries of the very left wing.
They set their goal to create independent state on the territory of Ottoman Turkey, and the methods of achieving this goal were simple and effective: the seizure of banks, the murder of officials, explosions and similar acts of terrorism.
It is clear how the government reacted to such actions. But the situation was getting worse national factor, and the entire Armenian population had to answer for the actions of the Dashnak militants - they called themselves fedains. V different corners The Ottoman Empire now and then flared up unrest, which ended in pogroms and massacres of Armenians.
The situation became even more aggravated in 1914, when Turkey became an ally of Germany and declared war on Russia, which was naturally sympathetic to the local Armenians. The government of the Young Turks declared them "the fifth column", and therefore it was decided to deport them to the remote mountainous regions.
You can imagine what such a massive resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women, old people and children, since men were drafted into the active army. Many died from hardship, others were killed, there was an outright massacre, mass executions were carried out.
After the end of the First World War, a special commission from Great Britain and the United States was engaged in the investigation of the Armenian Genocide. Here is just one short episode from the testimony of the miraculously surviving eyewitnesses of the tragedy:
“Approximately two thousand Armenians were gathered and surrounded by the Turks, they were doused with gasoline and set on fire. I myself was in another church that they tried to set fire to, and my father thought that this was the end of his family.
He gathered us around ... and said something that I will never forget: do not be afraid, my children, for soon we will all be in heaven together. But fortunately, someone discovered secret tunnels ... through which we escaped. "
The exact number of victims was never officially calculated, but at least a million people died. More than 300 thousand Armenians took refuge in the territory of the Russian Empire, since Nicholas II ordered to open the borders.
Even if the killings were not officially sanctioned by the ruling triumvirate, they are still held accountable for these crimes. In 1919, all three were sentenced to death penalty in absentia, as they managed to escape, but then one by one they were killed by avenger fighters from radical Armenian organizations.
Enver Pasha associates were convicted of war crimes by the Allies from the Entente with the full consent of the government new Turkey, which was headed by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He began to build a secular authoritarian state, the ideology of which was radically different from the ideas of the Young Turks, but many organizers and performers of the massacre came to his service. And the territory Turkish Republic by that time it was almost completely cleared of Armenians.
Therefore, Ataturk, although he personally had nothing to do with the “final solution of the Armenian issue,” categorically refused to acknowledge the accusations of genocide. In Turkey, they sacredly honor the covenants of the Father of the Nation - this is the translation of the surname that the first president took for himself - and they firmly adhere to the same positions to this day. The Armenian Genocide is not only denied, but for its public recognition, a Turkish citizen can receive a prison term. What happened recently, for example, with a world famous writer, laureate Nobel Prize on literature Orhan Pamuk, who was released from the dungeons only under the pressure of the international community.
At the same time, some European countries provide for criminal punishment for denying the Armenian genocide. However, only 18 countries, including Russia, officially recognized and condemned this crime of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkish diplomacy reacts to this in different ways. Since Ankara dreams of joining the EU, they pretend not to notice the "antigenocidal" resolutions of the states from the European Union. Turkey does not want to spoil relations with Russia because of this. However, any attempts to raise the issue of recognition of the genocide by the US Congress are immediately rebuffed.
It is difficult to say why the government of modern Turkey stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the 95-year-old crimes committed by the leaders of the dying Ottoman monarchy. Armenian political analysts believe that Ankara is afraid of subsequent demands for material or even territorial compensation. In any case, if Turkey really wants to become a full-fledged part of Europe, these long-standing crimes will have to be recognized.
The Armenian Genocide is the physical destruction of the Christian ethnic Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which took place from the spring of 1915 to the autumn of 1916. The Ottoman Empire was home to about 1.5 million Armenians. During the genocide, at least 664 thousand people died. There are suggestions that the death toll could have reached 1.2 million people. Armenians call these events Metz Yeghern "("Great Atrocity") or "Aghet"("Catastrophe").
Mass extermination of Armenians gave impetus to the origin of the term "genocide" and its codification in international law... Lawyer Rafael Lemkin, the author of the term “genocide” and the ideological leader of the United Nations (UN) anti-genocide program, has repeatedly stated that his youthful impressions of newspaper articles about the crimes of the Ottoman Empire against Armenians formed the basis of his convictions about the need to provide legal protection national groups. Thanks in part to Lemkin's tireless efforts, in 1948 the United Nations approved the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."
Most of the killings of 1915-1916 were committed by the Ottoman authorities with the support of auxiliary troops and civilians. Government controlled political party"Unity and Progress" (whose representatives were also called Young Turks), set itself the goal of strengthening the Muslim Turkish domination in Eastern Anatolia by exterminating the large Armenian population in this region.
From 1915-1916, the Ottoman authorities carried out large-scale mass executions; also Armenians died during mass deportations due to hunger, dehydration, lack of shelter and disease. In addition, tens of thousands of Armenian children were forcibly removed from their families and converted to Islam.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Armenian Christians were one of the many significant ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire. In the late 1880s, some Armenians created political organizations that sought to obtain greater autonomy, which increased the doubts of the Ottoman authorities about the loyalty of the wide strata of the Armenian population living in the country.
On October 17, 1895, Armenian revolutionaries seized the National Bank in Constantinople, threatening to blow it up along with more than 100 hostages in the bank's building if the authorities refused to grant the Armenian community regional autonomy. Although the incident ended peacefully thanks to French intervention, the Ottoman authorities carried out a series of pogroms.
In total, at least 80 thousand Armenians were killed in 1894-1896.
MAD TURKISH REVOLUTION
In July 1908, a faction that called itself the Young Turks seized power in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople. The Young Turks were mainly officers and officials of Balkan origin who came to power in 1906 in secret society known as "Unity and Progress", and transformed it into a political movement.
The Young Turks sought to introduce a liberal constitutional regime not related to religion, which would put in equal conditions all nationalities. The Young Turks believed that non-Muslims would integrate into the Turkish nation if they were confident that such a policy would lead to modernization and prosperity.
At first it seemed that the new government would be able to eliminate some of the causes of social discontent in the Armenian community. But in the spring of 1909, Armenian demonstrations demanding autonomy escalated into violence. In the city of Adana and its environs, 20 thousand Armenians were killed by soldiers of the Ottoman army, irregular troops and civilians; up to 2 thousand Muslims perished at the hands of the Armenians.
Between 1909 and 1913, Unity and Progress activists began to lean more and more towards a sharply nationalist vision of the future of the Ottoman Empire. They rejected the idea of a multi-ethnic "Ottoman" state and sought to create a culturally and ethnically homogeneous Turkish society. The large Armenian population of Eastern Anatolia was a demographic obstacle to achieving this goal. After several years of political turmoil on November 23, 1913, as a result of a coup d'état, the leaders of the Unity and Progress party gained dictatorial power.
WORLD WAR I
Mass atrocities and genocide are often committed in times of war. The extermination of Armenians was closely linked with the events of the First World War in the Middle East and on the Russian territory of the Caucasus. The Ottoman Empire officially entered the war in November 1914 on the side of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary), which fought against the Entente countries (Great Britain, France, Russia and Serbia).
On April 24, 1915, fearing an allied landing on the strategically important Gallipoli Peninsula, the Ottoman authorities arrested 240 Armenian leaders in Constantinople and deported to the east. Today, Armenians consider this operation to be the beginning of genocide. The Ottoman authorities claimed that the Armenian revolutionaries had established contact with the enemy and were about to assist the landing of French and British troops. When the Entente countries, as well as the United States, which at that time still remained neutral, demanded explanations from the Ottoman Empire in connection with the deportation of Armenians, it called its actions precautions.
Beginning in May 1915, the government expanded the scale of deportations, expelling the Armenian civilian population, regardless of the remoteness of their places of residence from the war zones, to camps located in the desert southern provinces empire [in the north and east of modern Syria, north Saudi Arabia and Iraq]. Many escorted groups were sent south from the six provinces of Eastern Anatolia with a high proportion of the Armenian population - from Trabzon, Erzurum, Bitlis, Van, Diyarbakir, Mamuret-ul-Aziz, as well as from the province of Marash. Later, the Armenians were expelled from almost all regions of the empire.
Since the Ottoman Empire was an ally of Germany during the war, many German officers, diplomats and humanitarian workers witnessed the atrocities committed against the Armenian population. Their reactions ranged from horror and formal protests to individual cases tacit support for the actions of the Ottoman authorities. Generation of Germans who survived the First world war, remembered these horrific events in the 1930s and 1940s, which influenced his perception of the Nazi persecution of Jews.
MASS KILLING AND DEPORTATION
In obedience to the orders of the central government in Constantinople, the regional authorities, with the complicity of the local civilian population, carried out mass shootings and deportations. Military and security officials and their supporters killed most of the Armenian men of working age, as well as thousands of women and children.
During the escorted desert crossings, the surviving elderly, women and children were subjected to unauthorized attacks by local authorities, nomadic gangs, criminal groups and civilians. In the course of these attacks, robberies took place (for example, the victims were stripped naked, their clothes were taken from them and their bodies were searched for valuables), rape, kidnapping of young women and girls, extortion, torture and murder were committed.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died before reaching the designated camp. Many of them were killed or kidnapped, others committed suicide, and a huge number of Armenians died from hunger, dehydration, lack of shelter or disease on the way to their destination. While some residents of the country sought to provide assistance to the deported Armenians, many more ordinary citizens killed or tortured the escorted.
CENTRALIZED ORDERS
Although the term "genocide" appeared only in 1944, most scientists agree that the massacres of Armenians correspond to the definition of genocide. The government, controlled by the Unity and Progress Party, took advantage of the state of martial law in the country to pursue a long-term demographic policy aimed at increasing the proportion of the Turkish Muslim population in Anatolia by reducing the Christian population (mainly Armenians, but also professing Christian Assyrians). Ottoman, Armenian, American, British, French, German and Austrian documents of that time indicate that the leadership of the Unity and Progress party deliberately exterminated the Armenian population of Anatolia.
The Unity and Progress Party issued orders from Constantinople and enforced them with the help of its agents in the Special Organization and local administrations. In addition, the central government required close monitoring and collection of data on the number of Armenians deported, the type and number of housing units they left behind, and the number of deported citizens who entered the camps.
The initiative regarding certain actions came from the top members of the leadership of the Unity and Progress party, and they also coordinated actions. The central figures in this operation were Talaat Pasha (Minister of Internal Affairs), Ismail Enver Pasha (Minister of War), Behaeddin Shakir (Head of the Special Organization) and Mehmet Nazim (Head of the Demographic Planning Service).
According to government decrees, in certain regions the share of the Armenian population should not exceed 10% (in some regions - no more than 2%), Armenians could live in settlements, which included no more than 50 families, as far away as from the Baghdad railway. and from each other. To fulfill these requirements, local authorities deportations of the population were carried out over and over again. The Armenians crossed the desert back and forth without the necessary clothing, food and water, suffering from the scorching sun during the day and freezing from the cold at night. The deported Armenians were regularly attacked by nomads and their own escorts. As a result, under the influence natural factors and targeted extermination, the number of deported Armenians has significantly decreased and began to meet the established standards.
Motives
The Ottoman regime pursued the goal of strengthening the military positions of the country and financing of the "Turkishization" of Anatolia by confiscating the property of killed or deported Armenians. The possibility of property redistribution also stimulated broad masses of ordinary people to participate in attacks on their neighbors. Many residents of the Ottoman Empire considered Armenians to be well-to-do people, but in fact, a significant part of the Armenian population lived in poverty.
In some cases, the Ottoman authorities agreed to grant the Armenians the right to live in the former territories, subject to their acceptance of Islam. While thousands of Armenian children were killed through the fault of the Ottoman authorities, they often tried to convert children to Islam and assimilate them into Muslim, primarily Turkish, society. As a rule, the Ottoman authorities avoided carrying out mass deportations from Istanbul and Izmir in order to hide their crimes from the eyes of foreigners and extract economic benefit from the activities of the Armenians living in these cities in order to modernize the empire.
If the Law does not work, and the state does not fulfill its duties, then the duty of citizens is to take the administration of justice into their own hands.
C. Lynch
The trial of V. Kaloev, who killed an air traffic controller in Switzerland, through whose negligence the Kaloev family died, in again raised the age-old legal question: does an ordinary citizen have the right to revenge against deliberate criminals?
We will not touch upon the purely legal side of this problem. Let us only recall how, without any international tribunals and trials, justice overtook the organizers of the first genocide in the twentieth century.
1915 was not only the second year of the First World War. 90 years ago, the genocide of an entire nation took place. The so-called Young Turks who ruled in the Ottoman Empire organized a brutal massacre of the Armenians living under Turkish rule, aiming at their complete destruction.
Let us recall that at the beginning of the 20th century, the Armenians did not have their own statehood for several centuries and were a divided people. The eastern part of historical Armenia in 1828 became part of Russia, which became the salvation of the Armenians as a nation. In the Russian Empire, the Armenians were able to freely develop their culture and achieved economic prosperity. Many Russian Armenians have made a brilliant career, giving Russia many military leaders, administrators, business leaders, artists, scientists. Both in the Russian Empire and in the USSR, Armenians were very abundantly represented in the political, economic and cultural elite. (However, you cannot erase words from the song. Many revolutionaries also came out of the Armenians, and at sunset Soviet era it was the Armenian movement in Karabakh that became the bomb that blew up the USSR).
But Russian eastern Armenia was only 1/10 of the territory of historical Armenia. Most of the Armenian lands are still part of Turkey. 90 years ago she lived there and most of Armenian people. But now there are no Armenians in these lands. For many years, the Turks have worked very creatively to cleanse these lands from the indigenous people. Armenian pogroms have taken place many times over the course of several centuries. Only in 1894-96. the Turks killed at least 200 thousand Armenians. Fleeing from Turkish captivity, hundreds of thousands of Armenians fled to Russia. It is interesting that in 1828 only 107 thousand people lived on the lands of eastern Armenia annexed to Russia. But by 1914, there were already 2 million Armenians in the Russian Empire. It is clear that the main reason for such a rapid growth was the massive immigration of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire. However, despite the departure to Russia and other countries, due to the assimilation of a part of the Armenians who converted to Islam and turned into "Turks", as well as the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in periodic pogroms, by the beginning of the First World War, over 4.5 million lived in Turkish Western Armenia. Armenians.
Position Turkish Armenians especially worsened when the Young Turks seized power in the Ottoman Empire. So they called themselves not because of their youth, but because there really were enough "new Turks" among them from among those who had converted to Islam from the most diverse ethnic and religious groups. There were especially many crypto-Jews among the Young Turks. The Young Turks were led by three military men: Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Dzhemal Pasha. The Young Turk party was called "Ittihad ve terraki" ("Unity and progress"), and the official ideology of the party was Pan-Turkism, or the theory of "Great Turan", which proclaimed the need to unite all Turkic tribes in one empire from Bosnia to Altai.
The Armenians aroused special hatred among the Young Turks because the western Armenia inhabited by them separated the purely Turkish regions from Azerbaijan and the places of settlement of other Turkic tribes. In addition, enterprising Armenian merchants, even under Turkish oppression, managed to take possession of a significant part of the finances of the Ottoman Empire. And, what was most important for the Young Turks, the Armenians were always distinguished by pro-Russian sympathies and the Young Turks rightly feared a general uprising in Western Armenia.
And so, in the conditions of the outbreak of war, on April 24, 1915, by order of the Young Turkish triumvirate, Turkish regular waxes, police, gangs of marauders and Muslim fanatics began a grandiose massacre of Armenians throughout the Ottoman Empire. Within a few months, up to 2.5 million Armenians died, few managed to escape, the bulk of the survivors were thrown into concentration camps in the Arabian deserts, where most of them died from hunger and epidemics. Several hundred thousand Armenians were saved by the offensive of the Russian army on the Caucasian front, launched by the command specifically for the purpose of saving Christians. However, after 1915 there were no Armenians left in the former Western Armenia.
Soon, Eastern Armenia suffered severe trials. After the revolution, the Russian Empire collapsed. In Azerbaijan, the Pan-Turkists from the Musavat party who seized power immediately began massacring the Armenians. The Georgian Mensheviks did the same. Turkish troops continued to finish off the Armenians not only at home, but also launched an offensive into eastern Armenia, continuing to develop their plan of genocide. On a small patch of Eastern Armenia hunger and disease raged, claiming the lives of a third of the population, but the Armenians managed to defeat the Turks, Azerbaijanis and Georgians. In November 1920, eastern Armenia was occupied with almost no resistance by the Red Army, and the Armenian Soviet Republic was created.
In total for 1915-1920. half of all Armenians perished, Western Armenia was left without an indigenous population, a third of all men in Soviet Armenia were invalids of the war, over a million Armenian refugees scattered all over the world.
The Armenian refugees were split into many parties, but all Armenians were unanimous that the Young Turkish leaders should be destroyed. But not a single government in the world was going to help the Armenians. The USSR, where many Armenians were part of the party and state leadership of the country, in the 20s. had close friendly ties with Turkey. The Entente countries were busy with the division of the Ottoman Empire, and they had no time for any Armenians there. The "world progressive community" was then just as corrupt as it is today. The genocide of the Armenian people was not noticed by her. Subsequently, Hitler, preparing genocide against other peoples, cynically but rightly remarked: “who knows about the Armenians these days”?
But even in such conditions, the Armenians decided to administer justice. Shagen Natalie (it was a pseudonym in honor of his beloved woman) and Grigory Merchanov took up revenge. A list of organizers and main perpetrators of the genocide was compiled. Started preparatory work: pursuit, gathering information, obtaining weapons. And then a quick and right judgment followed:
- Talaat Pasha was shot dead in Berlin on March 16, 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian (by the way, the jury fully acquitted him);
- Enver Pasha was killed in 1922 in Turkestan by the red commander Hakob Melkumov;
- Dzhemal Pasha was killed in Tiflis on June 25, 1922, Stepan Tsakhikyan and Petros Ter-Poghosyan were avengers;
- Beibut Khan Jevanshin (Minister of Internal Affairs of Musavat Azerbaijan) was killed on June 18, 1921 in Constantinople by Misak Torlakyan;
- Said Halim Pasha (former Prime Minister of Turkey) was killed in Berlin on December 5, 1921 by Arshavir Shirokyan;
- Shekir Bey (former head of the special commission for organizing the massacre of Armenians) was killed on April 17, 1922 by Aram Yerkyan.
Several Armenian traitors were also included in the "black list" of those responsible for the genocide. All of them were killed by their relatives (brothers, fathers, nephews). This was done on purpose so as not to cause blood feud among the Armenians themselves.
In just three years, all the organizers of the genocide were executed. Along the way, several thousand more participants in the massacre of a lower rank were eliminated. No one escaped retribution!
This is how the poor emigrants who survived the massacre, lost their homeland, divided into dozens of parties, took on the role of judges and delivered justice. History gives us such a historical example.
Sergey Viktorovich Lebedev, doctor philosophical sciences, professor (St. Petersburg)
